The tension.
The sound.
The circulation.
The strap does not begin when it lands.
It begins earlier.
It begins with the sound.
There is a chair slightly crooked against the wall. I have been looking at it for a while. I am not sure whether it was always like that. Every time I look back at it, the angle seems different.
It probably has not moved.
The strap has.
The air announces it a few seconds before it arrives. It is not a threat. It is a reorganization. Something shifts inside me before contact ever happens.
For a long time I thought the impact was the important part.
Now I am not so sure.
What remains is not the strike.
It is the expectation of the next one.
An expectation that eventually occupies more space than the body itself.
Somewhere in the room a pipe produces a dry clicking sound.
Then nothing.
Then another.
It matches nothing that is happening.
And that is precisely why I cannot stop listening to it.
The skin tries to interpret.
The muscles try to anticipate.
The breath tries to negotiate.
None of the three seems particularly successful.
There is a strange moment when I think I hear two sounds.
The strap.
And another, fainter one behind it.
By the time I try to separate them, it is already too late.
Perhaps the second sound never existed.
The surface of the body begins behaving differently. Insignificant areas acquire absurd importance. Others almost disappear.
A seam in the clothing becomes impossible to ignore.
The position of a finger stops mattering.
Attention no longer follows its usual logic.
It shifts.
Like water searching for a crack.
Like dust gathering in the same corner every day.
There is something awkward about admitting it.
Something difficult to acknowledge.
The harder I try to preserve a coherent sense of myself, the more fragmented it becomes.
I do not disappear.
But I stop occupying the center.
On a nearby table there is a mug with a half-circle of moisture beneath it.
I become convinced the mark is larger than before.
I watch it for several seconds.
It does not change.
I think.
The strap moves again.
The chair remains crooked.
The pipe clicks once more.
And between these small events that seem unrelated to the scene, something continues reorganizing itself inside me without asking permission.
By the end I no longer know whether I am waiting for the contact.
Or for that silent transformation that appears just before it.
I have to move the neck I am not moving it the neck has locked I should…
